Installing

Running WeeChat

WeeChat is going to have multiple interfaces at some point, run weechat-[interface] to start WeeChat.

As WeeChat currently only has an Ncurses interface. The command to start WeeChat is:

$ weechat

Configuration

You can configure WeeChat in 3 ways: using WeeChat's internal commands; using iset; or by editing the .conf files directly. WeeChat will automatically save settings on exit or when you run /save, so if you are editing a .conf file in an editor, be sure to run /reload from the console before exiting, otherwise your changes will be lost.

Internal commands

You can get a list of all configurable options by typing /set in the weechat buffer window. Since there are nearly 600 default configurable options, you can search through them with a wildcard syntax: /set irc.server.* or /set *server* as an example. You can get help on each option with the /help command:

/help irc.server.freenode.autoconnect

Internal menu-based

For a more convenient method, install the iset script. If you have weechat 0.3.9 or newer, run:

Key Bindings

SSH connection lost when idle

If you're connecting to your WeeChat through a remote shell using SSH, for example running it in screen or tmux you might experience getting disconnected after a while when idle. There are multiple factors in play why this might happen, but the easiest way to change this is to force the connection to be kept alive by appending this to your SSH-configuration on the remote shell.

This has nothing to do with WeeChat itself, but losing connection when idle won't happen with it's alternative irssi by default, and thus is a common situation for those converting to WeeChat.

Mobile device notifications

To receive notifications for mentions or private messages to an Android mobile device, you can use the IrssiNotifier port to WeeChat from here. This script requires a Google Account, and a registration step with the service provider to obtain an API key. Then, install the plugin

The default configuration for weechat attempts to load all plugins found in /usr/lib/weechat/plugins which in this case includes ruby, lua, aspell and tcl. These packages are not required by the weechat package and may not be installed on your machine. There are two options if these errors bother you: